Arecibo

Almost everybody went on a tour of Arecibo today. This is a 1000ft wide radio dish that's used to mainly do astronomical, ionospheric, planetary, and seti work. I thought the coolest part was the asteroid imaging they did using this thing as a giant radar. People use this thing as a transmitter and blast a bunch of energy towards an asteroid then use the reflected wave to make a map of an asteroid. The video's Mike showed are fabulous. Check jpl echos too. Also, somebody gave a talk about using binary pulsars to test/confirm relitivity and gravitational waves. Pretty cool. I was amazed how accurately they could measure things.

Same flowers as in Hawaii.....

They installed a new secondary and tertiary "mirror" to correct for the too-simple spherical shape of the dish. The sphere is accurate to 2mm, and it's made of simple metal mesh......

The dish w/ reciever

Inge thinking about ET.

El radar..... and el swiss software engineer con Inge grabbing el mirror.